Girl Sees Familiar Face On Milk Carton, Makes Shocking Discovery

By: Mackenzie Wright | July 9, 2016

In the early 1980s, a new campaign to help find missing children was launched: putting their photos on milk cartons. Though at first there was a lot of promise, eventually the effort just dried up.

The Missing Milk Carton Campaign seemed like genius when it was started in the early 1980s. Milk cartons were an everyday item. Parents, kids, store owners, delivery men, teachers, cafeteria workers and users, etc. would handle milk cartons multiple times per day. With all that exposure, how could putting kids’ faces on milk cartons to help bring them home be a bad idea?

Child Find of America and Operation Lookout National Center for Missing Youth were partners in the campaign. The photos of missing children, along with vital statistics and pertinent information, were plastered on the back of millions of cardboard cartons. Cases of the early milk carton kids, such as Johnny Gosch, Etan Patz, Eugene Martin, became famous due to the national exposure their cases got from milk cartons.

By the mid-80s, the Milk Carton Campaign came under fire. Famous pediatricians in the public spotlight spoke out against them. Well-known doctors such as Dr. Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton had concerns that constant reminders of missing kids would make all children feel unsafe. Ultimately, on advice of the celebrity doctors, it was parents who led the fight to stop the campaign. The parents won, and the whole idea fizzled out.

There were some notable successes with the Milk Carton Campaign. One little girl named Bonnie Lohman spotted herself on a milk carton. Unfortunately, she was too young to read and didn't know what it meant. She did keep the carton, and eventually, a neighbor found it where she had been playing and called the police. Bonnie had been kidnapped by her non-custodial mother.

More often, however, kids on milk cartons remained missing. Gosch and Martin were never found. A suspect who confessed to killing Patz more than 30 years after his disappearance will be tried in September 2016, though the suspect turned himself in; milk cartons played no role in his arrest.

Thankfully, modern technology is spreading the word of missing children faster and more effectively than milk cartons ever could.